The present invention relates to improved methods and apparatus for assisting in human bathing. The problems involved in the methods and rituals of human bathing are perennial. The bathtub and combination tub/shower stalls in today's bathrooms are fairly hazardous venues for culturally imperative regimens of personal hygiene. With the advent of bar soap and liquid body washes, other problems have arisen, some creating hazards and others simply posing impediments to the efficiency of the bathing process.
People bathe for a multiplicity of reasons, including: 1) to a make their bodies appear and smell wholesome and clean, 2) for the hygienically healthful purpose of exfoliating skin--i.e., removing the dead cells on the outer layer of the skin to allow the underlying tissue to be exposed to the air, to unclog the pores in the skin through which gases and liquids are exchanged, and 3) to enjoy recreation and relaxation in the bathing process.
Bathtubs and shower stalls are normally constructed of hard materials such as ceramic-coated metals, plastics and composite materials of varying degrees of hardness. All these materials pose a hazard to the bather who slips and falls in the bathing arena. Bar soap and other liquid body washes aid the bathing process by providing surfactants which reduce the surface tension of water, allowing the creation of bubbles and small aggregates of bubbles (foam or lather) that help furnish the skin tissue and interstices thereof with the wherewithal to surround oily and dirt particles and rid the bather of aesthetically unwanted and potentially unhealthy accumulations on the surface of his or her body.
Surfactants work best when there is sufficient foam to inundate and saturate the area washed. Oil and grease molecules are non-polar and are therefore "hydrophobic" (non-soluble in water). The surfactants abundant in soap suds and foam are "hydrophilic" (adhering to the water and to the oil) in such a way that water and oil no longer repel one another. The greater the sudsing then, the greater the cleansing potential of the surfactant, and accordingly, the sudsing of the bar and liquid soap have become a desirable condition in the bathing process.
A bar of soap in the bare hands lathers or foams only minimally. Accordingly, resort is made by bathers to washcloths and sponges and other devices to afford foaming and exfoliating appliances for washing the body. Natural and synthetic sponges, netted bathing "puffs," and washcloths are among the major appliances utilized today by bathers to achieve sudsing, and to apply soap to the body so as to cleanse and "exfoliate" the body's skin tissue.
In the process of tub bathing, the bather often drops his soap in the water and must waste his time and test his patience retrieving it from generally murky tub water. When taking a shower, the bather must typically pick up his bar of soap from a soap dish several times either to lather his hands or the washcloth or sponge with which he is cleansing his body. In the process, soap can be dropped where, on the floor of tub or shower, it can cause the bather to slip and fall, and at least irritate, frustrate and endanger him in the process of bathing or showering. At the same time, adding insult to injury, the bar of soap is typically laid to rest and retrieved from a soap dish or other resting place in the shower or bath, the watery surface of which causes the soap to soften to a mushy condition, resulting in a mess to clean up and a waste of soap.
Modern bathers who have resorted to the use of sponges, bathing "puffs" and luffas have to waste time in the course of taking a bath or shower going to and from the soap dispenser to furnish the cleaning apparatus with the liquid soap. Approximately the same amount of time is lost to the bar soap user who utilizes a washcloth, which must have soap periodically reapplied in the same manner as when the bather is washing his body with his bare hands.
Since the bar soap is essentially a very slippery item in combination with warm bathing water, another impediment to its proper utilization is found with infants and geriatric or arthritic bathers. Any child under three or four years of age finds it difficult to grasp the bar of soap both because of its size and its slippery exterior. The hands of the aged and arthritic are often unable to grasp the wet soap with sufficient firmness to keep it from slipping out of the hands onto the bathing floor, and the aged and arthritic are precisely the people who should not be forced to bend over to retrieve soap or risk slipping on the bar that has been inadvertently dropped.
Some of the problems of bath and shower bathing are less apparent and more complex. For example, since the hands of most persons cannot handily reach the center of the back between the shoulder blades, there is a large patch of the back most people cannot clean without the assistance of another or the aid of a cleaning device. Many devices have been offered and sold to meet this need including the "soap on a rope" idea, the back brush, sponge on a stick, and the like. These "arm extenders" for the most part have the same deficiency--they still have to have liquid or bar soap applied each time they are used, and this takes time. In addition, in the case of a shower, not only time but also water and energy are wasted.
Another problem with bathing is that few have the luxury of the exclusive use of a bathtub or shower. Accordingly, a bar of soap is normally shared by several members of the same family, and sharing the same bar of soap generally means sharing the same viral and bacterial cultures that can adhere to soap, which is generally not provided with antibacterial chemistry.
The problem of disease contagion overlaps another problem incident to communal use of a bathtub or shower: the soap dish where a bar of soap (along with the microbes to which it is often host) is left to lie in wetness, which allows the microbes to remain alive and proliferate. The problem of soap dish wetness exacerbates both disease contagion and the mushy soap problem mentioned above.
Finally, some of the most important problems surrounding human bathing involve problems of resource consumption and ecology. The problem of soap bar waste is not a new one. People have tried for generations to devise ways to avoid wasting the perennial "soap sliver," which remains small, brittle and too little to use near the end of the useful life of a soap bar. The slivers can be hoarded, boiled and remolded into larger bars; they can be soaked until soggy and laminated one to the other, or (as most wind up doing) they can be tossed away by the hundreds of millions, creating a perverse systematic cultural ritual of economic waste. Slivers that are not tossed out often wind up clogging drain pipes, another expensive waste of time and money. More than half of the constituents of soap are organic in origin, derived from exhaustible earthly resources we can no longer afford to waste.
In addition to the waste of soap slivers, bathers, especially in the western world where cleanliness has always been "next to godliness," waste billions of gallons of water due to the slowness of their showering process. The traditional tub bather is going to use a sum certain of water, normally thirty to fifty gallons. The amount of energy consumed in the typical bath is also a constant. However, the clear majority of western bathers now take showers, and among them a considerable percentage take multiple showers per day. With a low-flow water showerhead, 1.6 to 2.5 gallons of water per minute are consumed. With a standard water head, 3 to 4 gallons of water per minute are used. When warm or hot showers are used, of course, energy is consumed. With electric water heaters, 3413 BTUs are created per kilowatt hour. With gas heaters, 1000 BTUs are created per cubic foot of gas.
Generally speaking, a standard thumbnail guide teaches the expenditure of sixty cents per twenty gallons of hot water consumed. Accordingly, a typical six-minute shower (at three gallons per minute) utilizes 18 gallons of water and (assuming a fifty/fifty water mixture of hot and cold), 27 cents worth of electrically-heated water. Extrapolating that over a year's time, and assuming 1.3 showers per day for the individual, we see that single individual is utilizing 8,541 gallons per year in his showers, and spending $128.12 per year in electricity (generally derived from the burning of fossil fuels). If these numbers are extrapolated on a national basis, in the United States alone, personal showers consume 2,135,250,000,000 gallons of water and $32,030,000,000.00 in energy annually.
The present invention addresses these needs and provides a bathing device that can reduce both of those numbers by at least about 25% and, hence, a device which can save the American public annually over 500 billion gallons of fresh water and over $8 billion in energy.
The ecological savings arise from elimination of time wasted in traditional showering procedures. Whether he is employing a prior art synthetic sponge, or the popular net "puffs" given away as premiums for the purchase of liquid soaps and skin conditioners by the major manufacturers, the modern bather is going to and fro from his soap dish or liquid soap dispenser applying the cleansing agent to his hand, washcloth or bathing device. Because the soap is separate from typical cleaning and bathing devices, resort to the bar soap or liquid detergent has to be made many times during the bathing process to maintain sufficient lather to do the cleansing and exfoliating desired. While the bather is doing so, he is wasting time. Other time is wasted when he drops his soap and has to retrieve it. Additional time is wasted when, at the end of his bathing process, he washes the bar of soap and the sponge or other cleaning device so that the soap will dry clean of residue or bacteria, and the washcloth, sponge or "puff" is cleaned and hung and dried for the next use or user. During this time, the water is running, and water and energy are wasted. In addition, since the bather is often in a hurry, liquid soap is generally wasted by the bather who wants a heavy supply of foaming surfactant.
There have been previous efforts to combine the bar soap to the washcloth in an effective and serviceable manner. Inventors have done various things to abbreviate the process, including hanging the soap in a net bag on the wall to eliminate trips to and from the soap dish (Upton Patent No. #4,480,939). One inventor has conceived of a device consisting of a sponge into which a bar of soap might be placed (Schubert U.S. Pat. No. #4,969,225), but the sponge is of a material referred to popularly as "luffa," and, being essentially a cell-foam product, insufficient foaming takes place. Also, the molded center housing is insufficiently expandable to accommodate different sizes of soap, and the sponge harbors bacteria causing the same problems as the organic sponges of old.
About 1992, there arose a bathing fad utilizing a modern variation on an older theme, viz., the exfoliating puff. Several soap companies have offered as a premium with the sale of liquid soaps and skin conditioners, a net tulle puff which utilizes a long cylinder of nylon or other plastic tulle, manufactured into an airy puff, the folds of which are pleated and puffed through a manufacturing method for diamond-mesh polyethylene net taught by Campagnoli (U.S. Pat. No. 5,144,744). The resultant "netted puffs" are then constituted of a "plurality of tubes" made of diamond mesh synthetic netting, and the puffs are utilized by application of liquid cleanser from a separate container in the bathing process. The synthetic netted tulle is excellent in its texture and its efficacy in "exfoliating" the skin, but the puffs frustrate the bather in their inability to retain sufficient liquid cleanser to avoid time-consuming trips back to the soap container to keep generating foam during the bathing process. One problem is that the puffs require a soap dispenser to be employed in the bathing arena, and since the process of sudsing is sequentially tandem to the process of applying cleanser to the puff, there is an inordinate waste of cleanser and time. The process also requires two hands, which leaves the infant, aged and infirm bather without a support hand to secure against a fall.
There have been meager efforts in the area of trying to combine the soap dispenser and the netted cleaning instrument, but none has been successful or popularly adopted due to certain inherent deficiencies. For example, the back scrubber invented by Jennings (U.S. Pat. No. 3,674,374) offers a folded netting material capable of utilizing soap slivers and even washing the back, but the device is large, expensive, requires stitching in its manufacturing process, and is too complex in use. Moreover, it lacks the feature of having netted surfaces which are independently moveable in relation to each other. Other inventors have suggested the integration of bar soap in water-permeable bags, but with inadequate results.